Workshop set for manager process

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, July 22, 2026

PORT TOWNSEND — The Port Townsend City Council is jumping right into the process to hire a new city manager.

Current City Manager John Mauro has been hired to take a similar role for Bainbridge Island and will start the new position on Sept. 8.

Mauro officially resigned from his position with Port Townsend on Friday. His last day is scheduled to be Sept. 4, according to a news release.

To start the process of selecting a new city manager, the Port Townsend City Council will host a special workshop at 6 p.m. Monday at city hall, 540 Water St.

“The workshop is for us to learn about what choices we have to make in proceeding with the city manager hire process and legal and other parameters there are on our role in that process,” Deputy Mayor Owen Rowe said Monday night during the council’s regular meeting. “Council can choose to get assistance, but the final decision is ours. We’ll just be learning and discussing. We will not be making any decisions.”

Port Townsend functions under a council-manager form of government through which the city council appoints the city manager, who serves as the chief executive officer of the city, according to the news release.

During Monday’s meeting, the city council took action to approve moving forward on three different projects.

The first was to approve a resolution to authorize the application for loan funding from the Public Works Board for the remaining design and construction of the Holcomb and Wilson street sewer upsizing project in an amount not to exceed $2.169 million.

Project manager Mike Connelly presented the project to the council.

“The project is meant to address a capacity bottleneck in our gravity sewer system that carries wastewater from the Rainier subarea toward the wastewater treatment plant,” Connelly said. “As this area develops, wastewater that will ultimately be collected will increase flows into this downstream portion of the sewer system. So the existing sewer system is not large enough to convey the projected flows.”

The project will replace and relocate the undersized sewer with a larger gravity sewer, according to the city documents.

“As we advance design, we identified several concerns with our original alignment,” Connelly said. “These included construction beneath or immediately next to private residences. And then the sewer, because of the elevation, required deeper excavation, and if we keep the sewer where it was located, it would have been limited access for future maintenance.”

The second council action was to approve a resolution to authorize an application for loan funding from the Public Works Board for planning and pre-construction of the Monroe Street Lift Station Rehabilitation Project in an amount not to exceed $780,000.

“The Monroe Lift Station is one of seven lift stations throughout the community,” project manager Andre Harper said. “It is our second largest lift station within the community. It serves most of Uptown. It receives the lift station pumping from Point Hudson and serves downtown as well.”

The station was built in 1965 and still used technology from the 1960s, excluding some minor upgrades in 2008.

“This lift station just doesn’t have the capacity to handle the future loads,” Harper said. “The original design flow was 850 gallons a minute. Future loads are now at 1,062. That’s peak flow, which we’ll see, and that’s approximately 1.5 million gallons a day of flow through that system.”

The full project to rehabilitate the lift station is estimated to cost $5 million.

During Monday’s meeting, the city council also approved a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Jefferson County for the Mill Road Lift Station.

“The funding we’ve assembled from the state and federal government to support what we’re doing at Evans Vista really depends on getting this lift station right,” Mauro said.

The lift station project is “another cool project of how things evolve,” Public Works Director Steve King said.

“When we initially applied for federal and state funding for Evans Vista, the urban growth area expansion at Caswell Brown had not happened yet, and so we were planning a lift station down on Mill Road near the Rainier Pond area,” King said. “Since that time, the county has purchased the property and did a UGA expansion that allowed that property to be sewered.”

The MOU between the city and the county “solidified the opportunity to locate the lift station on lands currently owned by the county,” according to city documents.

“We believe this is an important step because we don’t want any confusion, we want to end the record, because we are doing environmental analysis and then we have to go through the federal Uniform Act for how we secure property,” King said. “Because it’s federal money, we have to go through quite an extensive and expensive administrative process to acquire property and do environmental analysis.”

The city doesn’t want to go through all of that work without an understanding that the county is willing to sell the property to the city, he said.

“We do have to move this project along because our state funding will run out by July of next year,” King said.

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Reporter Emily Hanson can be reached by email at emily.hanson@peninsuladailynews.com.